Painted Knit Mitten Winter Greeting Card Craft

Continuing with my fun artufl and a bit painterly winter clothing themed greeting cards that can also be mini works of art, presenting the kaleidoscope knit winter mitten! After painting an ugly Chanukah sweater, and a graffiti knit cap, mittens were certainly in order! First I painted a gift box with pom pom mittens, but then I saw a tiny bit of clip art in an ad, which lead to drawing mittens and hats with cables and a bit of knit detail in my sketchbook, here, and that led to this kaleidoscope knit mitten greeting card! Now you can’t say I haven’t been letting you in on what goes on around here, well sort of! Ah yes, and maybe I should also reveal that some of my clothes now have little bits of paint on them and are designated “painting clothes”, sigh, par for the course! Okay, so put on some old clothes and lets get painting!

You’ll Need:

watercolor paper
acrylic paint
a white paint pen
example of how to draw a knit mitten, here

How To:

Follow the instructions that I’ve given for making my winter mittens box, here, and rather than painting a box, paint a card, or a piece of watercolor paper. My background was basically a ton of layers of circles, and brush marks in a range of colors. If you are going to produce a backgroun just for this project, make sure to do a bunch at one time. You can refer to my sketchbook drawings of mittens here, and it might be a good idea to draw a few practice ones before outlining your mitten on the actual painting. Because my background is very colorful the middle cable of the mitten needed a bit of solid color to define it, so I painted over just that section in pink.

You can of course opt to do a pair of mittens, or if you are making a card do one mitten on the front and the other on the back. You can also cut your mittens out and hang them on a wire clothesline with tiny wooden clothespins as fun holiday decor. So many ways to go with this artful knit mitten, so enjoy. Ah yes, and a mitten would make a great gift tag as well, gotta do that!

The background is a bit plain, but just sprinkling of little paint pen stars and dots does the trick. You could also add a few sequins or even some glitter! Just one more little idea to put out there, and that is that seeing the texture of the paint and the uneven quality of the background is what gives this piece life, so don’t worry about perfection, let your art live a little!